Example ELA 6th Grade Course

This unit explores how individuals develop a sense of self and learn to claim agency in circumstances not of their choosing. Warbreaker follows two Idrian princesses — Vivenna, who spent her life preparing to be sent to Hallandren, and Siri, who is sent instead — as they navigate a foreign culture, a political marriage, and a world where BioChromatic Breath functions as currency, power, and metaphor for the voice within us. Students examine how Sanderson uses these parallel journeys to ask what it means to find yourself when everything you assumed about yourself turns out to be wrong.

Students explore how Sixth uses direct observation and ecological knowledge to survive on the deadly islands of the Drominad system, and what happens when outside forces claim to bring "progress" to a world they don't understand. Sixth is a trapper who hunts on the deadly island of Patji — an island where every organism is a threat and survival depends entirely on accumulated, firsthand knowledge of how the ecosystem works. When the Ones Above, spacefaring visitors with advanced technology, arrive and begin studying the islands, Sixth must decide whether their curiosity is benign or exploitative. Students examine how Sanderson uses this conflict to argue that genuine discovery requires humility, patience, and respect for what already exists.

This research unit focuses on curiosity, evidence, and discovery through Sanderson's novella Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. On the planet Komashi — where the Shard Virtuosity Splintered herself — two protagonists live in radically different worlds that are secretly connected. Yumi is a yoki-hijo: a spirit summoner who stacks rocks in precise patterns to call spirits into her bright, tradition-bound world. Nikaro (called Painter) contains nightmares with specialized paint in the dark, modern city of Kilahito. When they inexplicably swap bodies, each is forced to inhabit the other's life — and through that forced collaboration, they begin to piece together evidence that Yumi's entire reality is a fabrication maintained by a machine that has enslaved the very spirits she summons. Students examine how Sanderson structures this dual investigation and what it reveals about how curiosity requires seeing beyond the assumptions baked into our own world.

This unit examines the relationship between myth, fairy tale structure, and contemporary storytelling through Sanderson's Tress of the Emerald Sea — a Secret Project novella narrated by Hoid, the Cosmere's ancient worldhopping storyteller. Tress is a cup-washer on a small island who crosses the deadly spore seas of Lumar to rescue Charlie, the duke's son she loves, from the Sorceress who has cursed him. The novel is explicitly structured as a fairy tale and equally explicitly deconstructs every assumption of that structure: the monster has a backstory, the hero is terrified, and the narrator is a chaos agent with his own agenda. Students examine how Sanderson uses and subverts archetypal structures to make claims about the stories we tell and why we tell them.